That morning, the commandante was at a gymnasio, a gym, working out. And whoever Ramon was talking to had eyes on him in the gym. The designated shooter was a guy named Gordo, who was riding on the back of a motorcycle. We waited there for about twenty minutes with Gordo riding around and around the block, waiting for the commandante to come out.
We finally got the word. We hear on the radio, “There he is. That’s him.” He was an older guy with a bald head and he’s walking across the street to his car with his keys in his hand. Gordo pulls up next to him with his .38 Super semiauto already in his hand. It was supposed to be a one- or two-shot kill, but the commandante got slippery and Gordo didn’t get off a clean shot to the head. We couldn’t tell if Gordo had trouble with the gun and allowed the commandante to move around or the reverse of that. In any case, it took five rounds to drop the commandante. Gordo got back on the motorcycle and we all headed back to the office. Once we’re back, Gordo apologized to Ramon for using so many rounds to kill the target. Gordo said to him, “My finger got stuck in the trigger. I’m sorry.” Ramon said, “No problem. As long as it got done.”
After the killing of the commandante, Ramon and David took a plane to Guadalajara. Big John, Tiburon, and I were told to take a day off and then meet up with a Mexican Army general. The plan was for the three of us to drive with the general to Guadalajara and take all the guns we had and meet up with David and Ramon. The general was a little guy and not really impressive as a military man. But he had the uniform and he could pull enough rank that no cops or Army personnel would stop us on the road.
On the drive up, the general says that he’s up for a promotion and when that happens he’ll be in charge of the entire district. He told Tiburon that he could guarantee safe passage for Ramon’s business throughout the whole district. He told Tiburon straight out that it would cost Ramon between $1.5 and $2 million a year for the privilege.
When we got to Michoacan, Tiburon dropped me and Big John off because he had to take care of some business. We set a time and place to meet later. So John and I just hung out and did the tourist thing along with a lot of Americans who went to live there for their retirement.
John and I were eating in the patio of one of the restaurants on the main drag. Along with the tourists and the local residents, there were some beggars on the street. One of them was a ten-year-old boy who was begging for money. He was barefoot and the clothes he was wearing were ragged and dirty. When he came up to us, the waiter tried to chase the kid away. I told the waiter to leave him alone and told the kid to sit with us. At first he didn’t want to. He asked for money and cigarettes. I asked him when was the last time he ate anything and the kid just looked down.
I ordered burgers and fries for him but I noticed that he was constantly looking up the street to a median divider where some people and a wrecked old wino were hanging on the benches. As we were eating, he eventually told me that the old wino was his father. The father didn’t work and the kid never went to school. His job was to panhandle and beg for money and cigarettes so his father could get drunk and smoke.
After he finished eating, he asked me if I could give him some money. I made the kid take us to a market where I bought shoes, socks, pants, and a shirt. At least he’d have something to wear. Before we left, I gave him twenty dollars even though I knew where that money was going. Whatever I gave him would end up as liquor going down his father’s throat.
Tiburon came back and we got in the car and drove to Jalisco. It’s the best place to buy tequila, so I bought three bottles of top-brand tequila for my father. We drove on to Guadalajara, where we met up with Ramon and David and spent three weeks doing some surveillance and putting in some cartel work.
A Guadalajara police commandante was working for Chapo and was working to get Ramon and the whole cartel out of Tijuana. David explained to me that this was going to be a real hard mission. The commandante was always surrounded with a Grupo Tactito—which is just what it sounds like. An elite unit of bodyguards. After David finished his briefing, it sounded like a suicide mission. At this point, I didn’t care. I was using a lot of heroin and still feeling terrible about the cambio women.
We had crews all over Mexico, and the guys in Guadalajara assigned to watch the commandante were a retired Mexican cop and a Mexican Army officer. Because of who they were, they were able to keep track of the commandante. Ramon knew this was dangerous, so he had a big Denali pickup truck reinforced with armor plating. The plan was for me and the ex-cop to ride in the armored pickup bed and be ready to hose down the commandante when we got our chance. I had an AK-47 with a 100-round magazine and a spare 100-rounder in case that first one wasn’t enough.
We got the call at 6:00 A.M. one morning and we loaded up the truck. For insurance and scouting, there were two guys on motorcycles riding along with us. When we got to where he was supposed to be, we got on his tail. I couldn’t see anything because I was laying in the truck with the ex-cop, so I didn’t know if the commandante was alone or if he had a whole squad of security men around him who would outnumber us and probably shoot the shit out of us and the truck. The ex-cop was smiling like a fiend. He had a gun and grenades and dressed like a fool—shorts, sandals, and a simple T-shirt. I was decked out in black and tactical boots.
We drive around for a while and then over the radio we hear one of our guys yell out, “There he is! There he is! Pull up, pull up!” The commandante was stopped at an intersection, so I got myself ready and as soon as our truck stopped, I was ready to pop up over the bed and spray the guy, not knowing how many security guys were ready to spray back.
The one thing I knew I had going in my favor is that the Mexican cops aren’t allowed to carry weapons with a round in the chamber. The only advantage was that after I started shooting, they’d have to chamber a round to shoot back and in that one or two seconds of advantage, I could hit enough of them that the return fire wouldn’t kill me. They called it “Los van a ganar al gatillo” (Beat him to the trigger).
As the truck came to a stop, the radio blared out again. “It’s not him! Abort! Abort! It’s not him!”
We leave the area in a big hurry and go back to the local office in Guadalajara. By that time I was sick with nerves. As soon as I was alone in one of the rooms, I went down on my knees and started praying to God and thanked him for making this thing go the way it went. I was sick of killing and I knew I wanted out. While I was praying, one of the guys on the crew walked in on me.
At the end of the three weeks, we pack up and fly back to Tijuana. We split up and went our own ways. One of the bottles of tequila I had started leaking in the luggage. One of the security guards at the airport sees the leak and pulls me out and starts harassing me about what was in my luggage and they want to search all the bags.
Fortunately, Tiburon hadn’t gotten out of the airport yet and he makes a quick call to Ramon. A short time later, Ramon shows up at the airport with eight guys and starts flashing official police badges to the security people and forces them to let me go. Ramon told the airport security people that he was on an “operativo privado”—a classified operation way beyond their pay grade. And just like that, we were sprung and I was on my way home.
27
“Are You Against Us?”
My child was only weeks away from being born. The expected due date was July 4. I wanted to stay around the house to be with my wife when the baby came, but Ramon had decided it was time to go on a full-scale war with Amado Carrillo. This war would either see us all killed or the whole Carrillo cartel killed. It was all or nothing.
Ramon and David rounded up thirty of us and took our cell phones away. We were going into the boonies and we’d be training for two straight weeks with no contact with the outside world. The place where we trained was a 550-acre ranch outside of Ensenada that belonged to a friend of Ramon’s. It was as close to hard-core military training as any of us would ever see outside of a real
military organization. We had to bring just about everything we needed to stay fed, watered, and equipped for the next two weeks.
We lived out of tents and we trained every day from sunup to sunset. We ran obstacle courses, learned how to do dynamic entries through doors and windows, how to lay down suppressing fire and flank an enemy position, perform vehicle ambushes, how to estimate distances for sniper fire, and every other military maneuver you could think of. The only luxury we had was a generator for lights at night and a camp cook. Everything else from doing laundry to stitching up cuts we had to do ourselves.
As it turned out, David, Gordo, and me were the only ones who could hit a target reliably at three hundred yards. Ramon had brought in a military-trained sniper to teach all of us how to do it, but the three of us were the only ones who could do it on command. By the time the two weeks were done, we must have fired hundreds of thousands of rounds and the place was practically knee-deep in spent shell casings.
On the day we left the training area, we headed down the road and stopped in Puerto Nuevo. It’s the best place around for seafood and Ramon decided to give us a break and buy dinner for everyone. He sent Tiburon and Gordo into a restaurant and told the owner that we had thirty people coming in and we’d all be armed. He told us all to bring our rifles, handguns, grenades, radios, and tactical gear with us into the restaurant. The owner pushed a bunch of tables together so we could all sit down and face each other. Ramon said we could eat all we wanted but we were restricted to one beer each. After the one beer, it was strictly soda. When the food came, it just kept coming. After two weeks eating camp food, we ate like animals.
While we were eating, three musicians walk into the restaurant carrying a drum, a guitar, and a horn. Ramon gave them permission to play but only if they played a narcocorrido that was written about him years earlier by a group called Los Tucanes de Tijuana. Some of the song lyrics that they sang were:
They say that the law is looking for me.
But I’m roaming with two men in the trunk.
And I’m armed to the teeth in the streets of Tijuana.
And they never find me.
Nobody ever told the owner or the musicians which of us was Ramon or if Ramon was even in the restaurant that day, but thirty heavily armed men having dinner in a public restaurant like that must have given everybody a clue who we were.
Ramon knew my wife was expecting any day and he said that if it was a boy, he’d give me a million dollars if I named him Ramon and he could be the godfather. Ramon never had boys, so he really wanted somebody to carry on his name. I thanked Ramon for the honor but I told him that David already had the claim on being my child’s godfather.
By the time we got to Ensenada and into cell phone range, my phone started buzzing. I got a lot of messages. All of them from people looking for me to tell me that I was a father of a little girl. She was born on July 8. I was thrilled. I told David that I had a daughter and David congratulated me. But he told me not to go home that night. We all needed to stay in the office because he was expecting a call and needed people to respond when he got it. David said he’d give me a month off to spend with my family after whatever he was expecting had happened.
He told me to collect all the guns and get them cleaned and ready to go if we needed them. So I went back to the office and spent the next four hours cleaning all the guns, topping up the magazines, and making sure that all the weapons were in good shape. We’d been gone for two weeks and I needed to get some money to my mother-in-law for her rent and expenses. I knew I wasn’t supposed to leave the office, but this was only going to take a little while. I asked Big John to come with me.
Instead of going right to my mother-in-law’s house, John said, “Let’s go out and celebrate your daughter.” We went to a club called the Acropolis, where everybody knew us because it was owned by Ramon. They knew about my daughter’s birth, and the bartender, a guy named Huero, starts sending over champagne and coke. I know it was stupid and unprofessional but once we started drinking and drugging, we ended up staying out all night.
John and me get back to the office the next morning and run into Hernan. He’s David’s cousin and he told us that David was there ten minutes ago and got mad at us when he found out we weren’t there and had stayed out all night. Hernan said, “David had a bunch of money for you and he wanted to go see the baby. He told me to tell you to get all your stuff and get the hell out.”
I told Hernan, “If David has a problem, have him come see me. If you’re gonna come at me, make sure your guns are blazing because mine are gonna be blazing too.” I never talked like that before about David but I was mad. I started pulling all my stuff out of the office and drove home. Just as I’m pulling up to the house, here comes my wife, her mother, and the baby. This is the first time I have ever seen my daughter. My wife put my daughter in my arms and things are going through my heart and my head that I never felt before.
My wife noticed that my car was all full of the stuff I had at the office and asked me, “Is everything okay?” I told her David was mad at me but it wasn’t a big problem.
I spent the rest of the day and night with my new family and spent a lot of time thinking about getting out of TJ and leaving the AFO. I knew that I might have to pay a price, but I had enough confidence in my ability to stay alive.
The next morning around 7:00 A.M., there’s a ring at the gate and sure enough, it’s David. He came alone. Just in case, I had my pistol in my back pocket. I wasn’t sure how David would react to me leaving the office without permission.
“I told you to stay at the office,” David said to me. I told him right back, “This is my first kid. I needed to see her and my wife. I know I broke your order and didn’t consult you first, but I didn’t do anything stupid.” That wasn’t exactly the truth.
Then David pulled out a leather bag that looked like a shaving kit, hands it to me, and says, “Here. I had some things planned for you. This is my gift to you for your daughter.” There was $20,000 in the bag.
I don’t know if Ramon would have gone as easy on me as David did, but David and me still had respect for each other.
“I apologize,” I told David.
He said, “It’s not that big a deal you going off like that.”
“Do you want to see the baby?”
David came into the house, took the baby in his arms, and right away started tearing up. “She’s beautiful,” he said. “When you get ready to baptize her, let me take care of everything.” While he’s still holding her he said, “Take a couple of weeks off. We’re going down south to take care of a few things. When we come back, I’ll check with you and see if you’re ready to go back to work.”
That was the last time I saw David. After he left, my wife and I spent a lot of time talking about what to do next. We both knew that I couldn’t just leave. I knew that I’d never rat them out, but they didn’t know that and wouldn’t believe me if I told them.
I finally told my wife, “I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to raise her in this world.”
She asked me, “What about my mom? We can’t leave her here.”
“We’ll take her with us.”
We loaded up whatever we could and drove to my mother’s house in Oceanside. Once we got settled in, I knew it was a matter of time before I’d start hearing from David or Ramon.
In the next couple of weeks, I went around the neighborhood and let people know that I was back for good and I was ready to go back into the dope business. By this time, I was a superhero in the neighborhood. Everybody knew where I’d been and what I’d done and they all wanted to go into business with me. I had a lot of dope connections in Mexico and I could get anything I wanted.
During that period of a few weeks, a homie named Phantom got shot and killed over some stupid gangbanging. People came to me like they came to Marlon Brando in the Godfather movie and asked me to
help with the funeral. I gave them $7,000 for a proper burial ceremony. I still had a lot of money then and it didn’t seem that much at the time. But to the homies, it was really generous.
A couple of weeks later, Big John shows up at my door. I wasn’t surprised to see him. I knew this was coming. “David is asking about you,” he said. “He heard you moved and he wants to know if you turned on us, giving up or what.” I told him, “I don’t want to raise my kid over there. I’m done.” Then Big John says, “Ramon doesn’t think you’ll turn on us. He says he wants to give you a job on this side of the border.” I told Big John that I was cool up here and making deals so I didn’t need a job. Big John went back to TJ and told David about our conversation.
A couple of days later I get a visit from a homie named Chato. Chato tells me that Ramon wants to talk to me on the phone. Ramon wanted me to go to Chato’s house and he’d call there at a specified time and he wanted me to be there to take the call. I told Chato, “Just have him call me.” Chato said, “Nah, dog. This is the way Ramon wants to do it.”
I knew from experience that this could be an ambush, so I go on alert. I knew Chato from when we were youngsters. And my mother knew his mother since they went to high school together. We were close enough that when we were growing up, I used to call Chato’s mother my auntie. So I wasn’t too concerned about Chato. But I didn’t know what was waiting for me on the street on the way to Chato’s house.
On the night that the call was supposed to happen, I took a gun with me. We waited around for the phone to ring and I could tell that Chato was real nervous. He was acting funny and I suspected he knew more than what he was telling me.
Finally the phone rings and it’s Big John on the line. The first thing he said was, “I lost your number is why I called you at Chato’s house.”
Confessions of a Cartel Hit Man Page 24